West
by AddioKira
Summary: When a new medical student at Miskatonic University develops a crush on a classmate, she has no idea how far his obsession with life after death will take them both. A re-telling of Herbert West: Reanimator in the present day.
1. Chapter 1

I've been pulling my hair out again. I know it's a disgusting habit, but I can't help it.

I've heard of people who go too far, who pull until they have a bald spot and have to wear scarves, or a wig until it grows back. Not me. I'm careful.

I only pull the right kinds of hairs, the ones that have to be pulled out by the slimy, sticky little root. Only the hairs that feel different, that rasp between the pads of my thumb and forefinger. The ones that don't belong. I can spend hours searching for just the right kind of hair. I have plenty of time.

They don't like me to do it. They tell me to try and think of what makes me want to, and deliberately do something else. Or think of something else. And break the habit that way. But it's not so easy. No matter what I think about, it's the same. My hand goes to my hair again, and I can lose hours, staring into space, searching for hair that must be pulled out, no matter what they say.

So they gave me a pen. Well, a felt marker really, that's all we're allowed. And they gave me a pad and they said write it down. Maybe they thought it would keep my hands busy. Joke's on them. I can balance my pad on my knee, write with my right hand, and pull my hair with my left hand.

I shouldn't be smug. I like it here. They're nice to me here. There's the ocean, and it's warm. I can sit outside in the sun if I want, and watch the waves. And there are no basements. That was the deal, I told my mother so. I'd only go willingly if the place had no basements. And she found this place by the water, which means there can't be basements, or else they'd flood in a storm. So I said okay, and here I am. The water is nice.

Except at night. Sometimes I wake up and there are the waves and the dark and the sound is like whispering through the walls and I have to get up and look out my window to make sure the room didn't become a basement. I have to look at the moon and the air and the sea and the sand. No one could tunnel under the sand, you know. It's too loose. It would bury them. So it's okay.

Except he was so clever. He could find a way to do it.

That's why I don't sleep on the nights where there is whispering.

Sometimes it sounds like his voice in the dark.

* * *

I remember seeing him for the first time, on my first day of medical school. My parents had paid my way, bemused that the little pet they'd had for twenty-two years could insist on something so definite, so mature as medical school. Not to a city school, like Harvard or Boston University, where I could be close to them as well as the fine glass-enclosed hospitals there, but to tiny Miskatonic U in shabby little Arkham. The school was better known for its literary and historical studies than its medical school, but I (city girl though I was) was terrified of the haughty Harvard students, who no doubt aspired to be the top surgeon of some big name hospital or other. I was more modest - I only wanted a small, general practice where I would be part of the community, like the kindly doctor in Back Bay I'd grown up with, who knew all her patients by name and was often invited to Sunday dinners.

I'd felt exhilarated that day, feeling that I had my last blank page of school before me upon which to write whatever I wished, leaving the snarl of college disappointments behind me. Here, I was determined not to make a mess of things for once. (And you can see where that got me, ha ha.)

He was alone, striding across a green patch of lawn, and gaining quickly on the nervous gaggle of fellow first years I had latched myself onto. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with ashy blond hair that managed to look both lank and unruly at the same time. He had severe little wire-frame glasses, and a sharp nose. His eyes, I noticed when he came close, where a light blue - more milky than watery. Some people have eyes that are "piercing," but his were not. The blue instead looked oddly flat, like the surface of a tile. When he looked at me, I could practically feel the cold tiles press lightly against my skin.

"Is this the building for biochem? With Doctor Halsey?" he'd asked.

My hand shot up to my hair, twisted a lock, pulled. "Yeah. Lecture room three."

"Thanks." He'd turned, leaned against the near wall, lit a cigarette. The girl I'd been talking to gave me an astonished look. I shrugged. She mouthed "not bad!" at me. I pretended not to see, and shouldered my bag, heading to class - biochem with Doctor Halsey.

The scraggly group of first years dispersed as we entered the lecture hall. I walked in ahead and took a seat near the side, wondering if one of the group would sit next to me. No one did. The group reformed in the middle row, too far for me to hear their conversation. I pulled out a book, turned to the reading assignment, pretended not to care.

Really, it was the smell that hit me first. Fresh-smoked cigarette, and underneath a sharp citrusy cologne, barely there but heightened by the cigarette. The type of scent that sneaks up behind you and sinks tiny hooks into your sinuses. One of the doctors here wore something like that a few weeks ago, and I threw up on his shoes.

(ha ha)

He'd sat down next to me, despite the full row of empty seats that he could have taken.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," I said

And we waited for the lecture.

I have to admit that I've forgotten what I learned in medical school, and college as well. I'd majored in biochemistry, graduated _summa cum laude_ from a small but respectable Boston school. But after that night - the night in the basement - it all went away. Gone, as if that part of my brain had been torn out and replaced with scar tissue to fill the swiss cheese holes.

Post traumatic stress disorder, say some of the doctors.

I don't mind it, forgetting. I remember too much as it is.

I remember that it didn't take too long for him to get into an argument with Doctor Halsey. A few days of lecture, a few barbed questions and snapped replies, and suddenly the rest of the class didn't exist. It was just him and Doctor Halsey sparring over the nature of life and death.

"There is nothing, absolutely nothing about human consciousness that is unique," he'd snapped. "All it is is more detail. A more intricate structure. Tessellated. But the same structure."

Doctor Halsey scoffed. "Are you a scientist or a rhetorician? Until some very significant developments in biochemistry are made, there is no way to study the concept of consciousness, or rational thought, or soul."

"The only scientific word for 'soul,'" he spat back, "or God, or love, or fear, or life, or death is 'chemical.'"

"The only scientific word for what you are spouting is 'bullshit,'" fumed Doctor Halsey, indulging in his own, blunter rhetoric.

"I agree with him," said a new voice - mine. I had rarely spoken up in class before, and my outburst, made without even raising my hand, shocked me - but I continued. "The chemicals responsible for love, bonding, addiction, anger, fear - they've all been discovered. What's not to say there isn't a chemical at the bottom of logical thought? Or even just… life?" I trailed off. The argument had sounded forceful and potent coming from him. From me, it sounded hazy, flimsy.

Doctor Halsey seemed to think so too. He found my argument not worth countering, and segued back to the original lecture.

But he'd been struck dumb. He'd stared at me with those flat blue eyes as a smile, warm and genuine, like the sun tearing through clouds, grew wider on his face.

It was that moment when I cast my lot entirely with Herbert West.

* * *

I called him "West," partly because the stodgy name of "Herbert" didn't fit the fierce intellectual I'd found sitting next to me in every class we'd had together. The other part was that to a Boston-born girl, the idea of "West" connotated something distant, unattainable. This certainly applied to Herbert West. Though we were considered friends, he was always entirely impersonal towards me during our first year of school. We talked for hours about the development of the scientific method, the value of Aristotelian thought to the practice of medicine, or the intricacies of viral mutation, but even after a year I still had no idea of where he was from or who his parents were - if, indeed, they were still alive. I'd wondered about that, as he spent every vacation at school doing lab work or self-study, but I never dared ask.

The little information I got out of West was more than any of my classmates got. He never spoke a word to anyone - besides his professors or me - unless he had to, and even then he was formal and clipped. I admit that I enjoyed this, and made a habit of waving a hand above my head and calling out "West!" if I saw him walk by while I was talking to another student. He would invariably stop and talk to me - even if he had no time for a full conversation, he at least said a few words about where he was going, or what he thought of the last reading, or would I like to have dinner and go over our notes from this or that class. To whomever I had been speaking before he'd appeared, he said not a word, and I never tried to involve them in the conversation. When West had gone, I'd give the impatient student a little shrug that seemed to indicate my lack of control over the situation, but really meant "I can't help it if he only wants to talk to me."

It was obvious to everyone except West that I was in love with him, of course. The girl who I'd been talking to that first day of classes tried to give me advice on how to "make my move," as she put it, but doing so was as unthinkable to me as asking about his family. It would have been an affront, I thought. So I kept on as I had done, all the while thinking that if just once I could put my face close to his - not touching, just close- it would be worth it. More than worth it.

That isn't to say that I agreed with West against Doctor Halsey that day in class because I was in love with him and wanted him to like me back. No, I genuinely agreed with his theory. As a child of Unitarians, I had grown up without strong beliefs, and overthrew any weak ones without remorse. There was no scientific evidence for "God" or "soul" or any of it, and as such, any of those things did not matter to me in the slightest. Even the "love" I felt for West, I chalked up as chemically induced, and I assumed that if some process had been developed that could suck those particular chemicals out of my system, I wouldn't give him a second thought. But there was no such process, and as it was, I enjoyed being in love - frustrating as it was due to the reticence and impersonality of my object.

It was in our second year that things really began.

* * *

We were in a dissection class, the lot of us huddled over a still, stiff body, observing the musculature of the thigh and hip, as the the professor manipulated the scalpel. I was taking notes when my attention was arrested by a hand gripping my upper arm. The smell of cigarettes and faded citrus loomed as West whispered to me, "come here. I want to show you something."

I didn't answer, but slowly shuffle toward him, making it look as though I were shifting to give the students behind me a closer look.

We backed away from the cluster of students until we were at the head of the cadaver. West flipped the sheet with a flick, revealing half of the dead man's face.

"Look," West whispered, and drew something out of his pocket that flashed in the overhead fluorescent lights. A syringe - a big one. I looked up, but West gave a small shake of his head. "Watch him," he said. "Watch his eyes." I watched.

West paused for just a moment, then plunged the needle into the cadaver's jugular and forced the plunger down. The speed with which West jabbed the syringe in and removed it was startling. If I hadn't been watching, I would have missed it.

I watched. For a few seconds, everything was still. Then I heard West draw in a sharp breath, and the corpse's eyes flew open.

I was too shocked to move, though West's hand on my arm tightened to prevent my jumping anyway. The dead man's eyes focused, looked wildly around, and then fixed on my face. His lips parted. West's hand squeezed tighter around my arm, but I could barely feel it.

Then, as suddenly as his eyes had opened, they lost focused, stopped moving, lay still. He was, once more, a corpse.

West flipped the sheet back up as the professor with the scalpel (and God, I don't remember her name) looked up and said acidly, "if the two of you are finished with… whatever it is you're doing…."

Some of the other students snickered. The girl I knew gave me a surreptitious thumbs-up behind her notepad. West and I shuffled back toward the group, and I tried to pay attention to the rest of the lecture. The professor droned on, the students scribbled. None of them had noticed a thing.

I began to shake as I stood there. West shifted behind me, and held both my arms above the elbow in his hands, as if he were trying to hold me still, to tamp my shaking down. And while he did this, I knew he was watching me, as analytically as he had watched the corpse. I could feel the cool flat tiles of his eyes pressed lightly against the back of my neck.

After the lecture ended, I waited outside the laboratory building for the other students to disperse, and for West to light a cigarette. He stare at me as he did so, waiting for the obvious question. I knew he wouldn't say a word until he asked it.

"What the hell did you just do?" I hissed as soon as the lawn was deserted.

His expression - such as it was - did not change. "I haven't done it," he said. "Yet."

"It can't be done," I insisted with a shiver that had nothing to do with the late autumn air. He sucked on his cigarette and didn't respond.

"I mean," I continued, "think about brain death. The brain doesn't receive blood or oxygen for even a short period of time, and part of it just shuts down. There's no way to bring that back, even when the person is technically alive! And with someone dead, there's embalming or decay, brain tissue, nerves that won't function when they've rotted! And you can't reverse that once it's started! You just can't!"

West looked at me thoughtfully. "Yes," he said finally. "I'd thought of that. It means that to be successful, I need to have an unpreserved body, just deceased. Fresh."

"It means it can't be done!" I said, but he had stopped listening.

"Total, instant death, I mean. Someone whose body functions and brain stopped simultaneously. So caught at the same moment of decay with no prior brain death. What can do that?"

"An electric shock," I said without thinking. "Or maybe - some kind of poison? Dimethyl mercury?"

He shook his head. "Brain damage, even with a shock. And dimethyl mercury breaks down the bain prior to death."

"Then it can't be done," I said.

"Then what did you just see?" He waited, but I couldn't answer.

He finished his cigarette, crushed it out. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you what I've been doing."

His tiny dormitory room was a cluttered mess of makeshift bunsen burners, tubes, piping, chemicals, and cages of rabbits and guinea pigs in various stages of life, death and decay. The smell was ghastly, and I began to realize why he'd taken to napping on the floor of my modest off-campus apartment provided by my parents' largesse. The bed here was covered in textbooks, pads, pencils and other detritus. The naps must have been the only sleep he'd had on any given day.

"You can't keep this up," I remarked. Though most days I couldn't be bothered to rinse my coffee cup, this epic panorama of filth aroused a protective instinct in me, mostly comprised of disgust. "It's a fire hazard, West. You've probably got gas leaking out of the tubing here, and I can't even think of how your clothes must smell by now, and-"

"And I need to start on human cadavers," West finished.

"I guess so," I said, giving in, "if you can find any."

"I don't suppose you-"

"Absolutely not! My lease doesn't allow pets. Or cadavers. And anyway, you need my floor to sleep on."

West shrugged. "Unless you know an out-of-the-way place, big enough to set up equipment, and to accommodate bodies…

"Actually," I said, an idea dawning, "I think I do."

* * *

Arkham was a mill town during the industrial revolution, and remained so during the first art of the twentieth century. The economic upheavals and outsourcing of labor that occurred in later years had decimated the once-respectable town. The university and the better-off part of town lay on one bank of the Miskaton, filled with stone edifaces and puritanical feats of architecture dating from the seventeenth century. On the other bank lay the abandoned mills and factories, the shabby duplex houses with crumbling siding and sagging shingles, abandoned or occupied by the desultory castaways of progress. I was further beyond these that I steered my car at one a.m., turning onto a disused blacktop road that crumbled to gravel after a few miles. Here stood the farmhouses and barns, abandoned during the meal years, but of solid New England construction.

We settled on a smallish, out-of-the-way barn that was easily broken into, and then easily secured with our own padlock after we had done so. A sterile surgical room it wasn't, but it had the advantage of being thick-walled and relatively well insulated against the encroaching Massachusetts winter. West immediately declared it perfect, and we set to work clearing debris, and over the next few weeks, setting up equipment pilfered from the University. We cleared West's room just as clandestinely, the equipment going to the barn, and the animals to shelters, the carcasses snuck into a nearby landfill in the wee hours.

I began to keep West's sleeping habits, which were brutal. Only his bullying and my desire to be close to him in every way (including grades) kept me to my studies. the combination was effective. When winter exams concluded, I was fourth in our class. He was first.

The exhaustion took its toll. I spent most of the winter holiday asleep, causing my mother great concern. She asked me repeatedly whether I should think about taking a semester off to rest, and bristled at my increasingly indignant reply that doctors don't get semesters off. It was a relief to return to school and to West, who had refused my invitation to spend the holiday in Boston with me. Three weeks with no classes had given him the time to finish setting up the makeshift lab with a small propane tank powering a space heater and the bunsen burners. A few tins of sterno provided any additional needed heat. And a large pit had been dug in the dirt floor.

"What's that?" I asked.

West shrugged. "Insurance," he said. "If it doesn't work."

We set to work mixing chemical solutions to West's specifications, and soon all the experiment required was a cadaver. West took to monitoring the Arkham Advertiser website for local death notices. He also approached the single funeral director on the other side of the river, ostensibly looking for an opportunity to view embalmings to further his anatomy studies. While at the funeral home, West told me, he began to drop hints about the deplorable lack of human cadavers at the medical school, which stunted the students' anatomical education.

The funeral director wasn't moved by the students' plight, but was interested when West told him that the University would pay for any bodies donated to their program. The bodies, West said, had to be as fresh as possible.

Months passed, but in the early spring, during the throes of studying for our Step One USMLE, we got our break.

A migrant worker looking for a job had a heart attack, and dropped dead in a seedy Arkham bar. The cursory investigation performed by the authorities showed that he had no family to contact (though we suspected that his illegal status did not prompt them to look very hard), and he was turned over to the funeral director that West had cultivated. A phone call, an assurance that the University would handle the embalming process, and a check (supplied by my parents through a request for a new laptop) ensured that the body was ours in less than twenty-four hours of the man's passing.

Driving with a body in the trunk of my car was a nerve-wracking experience, but carrying the thing from the off-road clearing in which we'd parked to the barn was worse. The man had not been large, but he was bulkier than either of us, so that even using the large sling West had borrowed from the funeral director, we had to take frequent breaks as we wove our way through the trees.

Once inside the barn, we heaved the corpse onto a plank propped between two beams, and held our breath until we saw that the makeshift table could hold the weight. When West unzipped the body bag, I blanched a bit at the smell. True decay had not set in, but twenty-four hours without preservation and a ride in a car trunk had not done him much good.

"I don't know, West," I said. "It might be too far gone. And with cardiac there's sure to be some brain damage."

"It's here. We're here. We might as well try."

In reply, I handed him the syringe.

West injected the solution into the man's neck, and we waited. Nothing happened. We continued to wait. West pressed his (gloved) fingers into the man's neck, his wrist, his chest. Nothing. West produced a stethoscope, pressed it to the body. I could tell from his expression that there was nothing to hear.

West gave an irritated snort. "Damn. I could try to tweak the formula…." He looked at his watch. "It'll take me two hours, tops. If that doesn't work…" He glanced at the pit in the corner.

I sighed. I had wrenched my shoulder while carrying the corpse inside, and wasn't looking forward to shoveling piles of dirt into a hole for the rest of the night.

West tossed me the stethoscope. "Watch him," he said. "If anything changes-"

I nodded, and West turned to the plank holding the various chemicals and tools.

I kept my solitary vigil over the corpse, applying the stethoscope from time to time hearing nothing. An hour passed. I shifted on my feet - nothing to sit on, of course - and glanced back at West, who was absorbed in his work. I applied the stethoscope again - and there it was. Faint, almost inaudible, but there.

"West!" I cried. "Look, it's-"

But I was interrupted by the thing's drawing a shuddering breath. Then it started to scream.

The sound was inhuman, high, loud and piercing. I jumped back from the plank. The thing took another breath, reared back, then smacked me to the ground. I heard a smash, then a hollow thunk as West first threw the beaker he'd been working with, then the next nearest thing - the can of sterno he'd been using to heat the solution. The beaker missed, and smashed against the opposite wall. The sterno hit, thunked against the thing's head, rebounded and rolled behind the propane tank.

_Oh God_, I thought, _the propane tank_.

For a second, I thought the can might have gone out after having been thrown - but then saw the debris behind the tank begin to smoulder. The thing, temporarily stunned, shrieked again, and got unsteadily to its feet. It took one step toward me, and then I was yanked to my feet and pushed toward the door.

"Run!" West shouted in my ear, and I ran. West pushed the plank he'd been working on over, spilling chemicals and the bunsen burner which, I noted to my increasing horror, tore the makeshift piping out from the tank, allowing gas to escape into the air. The thing stumbled over the plank, thudded to the ground. I reached the door, was through it, ran out, West close at my heels.

We made it about twenty feet when West shouted "wait!" and turned back. I gave an inarticulate scream as he reached the barn again, thinking he'd run back inside, but he didn't. Instead, he slammed the door shut, fixed the padlock, and sprinted back to where I stood. He grabbed my wrist - re-wrenching my already injured shoulder - and set off on a dead run towards the car. We just reached it when we heard the bang of the propane tank exploding.

Turning onto the dirt road, I swerved away from the most direct route, driving over the river and around Arkham proper so as to approach the city from another direction. As I pulled into my apartment parking lot, I muttered a prayer to nothing in particular that no one would be awake to see us arrive at that hour. No one was. We slipped silently into the apartment, and I double bolted the door.

West sank into my sofa while I procured a bottle of aspirin from my medicine cabinet. After a moment's hesitation, I also took down a large bottle of ginger brandy, a Christmas gift from my Boston Brahmin grandmother, who had told me in a clipped voice that no _doctor_ had ever cured a cold, but ginger brandy had seen her through every one she'd had. I was not much of a drinker, and I'd never seen West drink so much as a glass of wine at a school function, but he accepted the glass I poured for him and tossed it back before I even had the chance to ask him if he wanted ice. He followed this with a fistful of aspirin, and another shot of brandy.

"This," he said as I poured him a third glass, "is disgusting."

"Don't knock the only known cure for the common cold," I said, sitting down with my own glass and shaking some aspirin into my mouth.

West stuck a cigarette in his mouth and started fumbling, unsuccessfully, with his lighter. "Please don't," I begged. "Between the fumes from the propane and the brandy, you'll explode us all over again."

West ignored me, and managed to light his cigarette. He didn't explode. My breathing started to sound like gasps, and I realized I was hyperventilating. I put one of my ice cubes in my mouth and forced myself to breathe around it, the cold air biting into my lungs. West finished his cigarette and lit a fresh one from the butt of the first.

"Why don't you take that off?" I asked, grabbing at his left hand, which still had a plastic glove on. West winced as I touched his hand, and after staring for a moment, I saw why. He'd grasped the can of sterno from its top, shoving his palm directly into its blue flame. A second degree burn had bubbled up in a perfect circle just below his fingers, and the plastic of his glove had melted onto his skin. West stared at his hand curiously, as though it belonged to someone else.

West refused to move from the couch to the bathroom, so I settled on filling a mixing bowl with cold water, soaking his hand in it, and prising the plastic up as gently as I could. It took me two glasses of the horrible brandy to stop my hands from shaking long enough to pick away the last scraps of plastic with a pair of sterilized tweezers without stabbing the large watery blisters on his palm. West alternately stared at what I was doing with his hand and at the ceiling, chain smoking and not saying a word.

I finished wrapping gauze around the burn, and sat crosslegged, waiting for West to move or speak. He didn't, save for the mechanical hand to mouth motion involved in smoking his cigarette. It was frightful to see him like that, and I wondered whether it was his success or his failure that had done it.

"West," I said. He didn't look at me. I took his chin in one hand, and turned his face toward mine. "West, I said. "wake up."

"I'm awake," he said, and he kissed me.

Things progressed rapidly from there, and we spent the rest of the night, and all the next day in bed, but not sleeping, save for fitful dozes that seemed only to last for a few minutes and ended with one or the other of us waking with a gasp, terrified.

When the sun began to set, and no police officers had come to knock down my door yet, West ventured out cautiously for a newspaper and more cigarettes.

"You could quit smoking and check on the internet," I ventured.

"It's more suspenseful this way," West replied, "and I'm looking forward to cancer."

He returned, undressed, lit a cigarette, and snapped open the newspaper with mock solemnity. He searched the headlines as I buried my face into the coverlet. He turned pages, then stopped. His mouth twisted into a smile that was more sneer than anything else.

"What?" I asked. West snickered. "God damn it, West," I said, throwing my pillow at him. "Are we going to jail or getting expelled or what?"

"Makeshift Meth Lab Destroyed in Blaze," he read.

I looked at West in astonishment. Then we both broke into hysterical laughter.

West read the story out between laughing fits. Barn destroyed, traces of methamphetamine discovered ("meth?" I asked, horrified. "Just more insurance," said West with a shrug), narrowing in on suspects involved in local White Supremacist gang.

West tossed the newspaper aside and lay next to me, both of us still laughing, his face close to mine. Bliss.

Except.

We were drifting off again, finally safe, knowing that privileged medical students from the prestigious local university would never be investigated for a drug manufacturing fire. But one thought suddenly struck me.

"West?"

"Hmm?"

"There wasn't a body, was there?"

"Mm?

"You knocked down the table, the thing fell over. You ran back and padlocked the door. But the newspaper story - it didn't mention a body - right?"

We didn't sleep that night either. And the next day, West applied for a handgun permit.


	2. Chapter 2

It's difficult to write about that time. I have to take a lot of breaks.

Sometimes I have to pull three hairs, sometimes five before I can continue. I have to lay them on the top of the page, sticking them to the paper by the root until I feel like I can keep going. It's only then that I can feel safely insulated from all those emotions I thought I'd suppressed, but that threaten to come bubbling up to the surface.

I feel them when the Seroquel starts to wear off, just like I'm back in that tiny apartment, in bed with West. Horror at what we'd done and what it might mean, terror that we would be caught and our careers ruined, blissful happiness, relief at having escape that first incident unscathed. I feel them all, and they congeal together into a paste that lodges between my lungs and my stomach. I feel it there now. It keeps me from eating. Food bounces off it and comes back up.

The doctors don't believe me when I try to tell them. They say "eating disorder not otherwise specified." They speculate that West imposed it on me as a form of control - or based on what I said about him in therapy, that he had one himself and that I just copied him, like I'd done with everything else.

It's nonsense of course. West simply had more interesting things to do than eat. As for me, I admit that I emulated all his habits - except the smoking (though even secondhand it'll probably give me just as much cancer, ha ha).

Now he's gone, though. And I still can't eat. It's that paste.

* * *

West and I caused a bit of stir at school when we finally emerged from my apartment after our brush with that thing. For one, we'd skipped a day of classes - a thing unheard of for West especially, as he treated each lecture as a personal debating forum. For another, our appearance after two days of hardly any sleep and nothing to eat except the caustic mixture of aspirin and cheap brandy was ghastly - and that wasn't taking into account the bruises I'd sustained getting knocked to the ground, and West's bandaged hand.

I'd attempted to cover up the worst of my face with a scarf and heavy makeup, but my efforts fooled no one. The girl who previously had encouraged me gave me one horrified look and turned away. I had a moment's panic that we'd been connected with the "meth lab" after all before I realized that she'd put my bruised face and West's bandaged hand together and come up with an obvious conclusion. West, thank God, did his part by not causing any arguments in class for the next week or so, seeming content with letting me take the notes for both of us, muttering if I missed something.

Rumors about our relationship flew for a short time, then died down as everyone buckled down for the Boards. I stopped trying to make friends with the other students. West moved into my apartment.

Once Boards were taken and the school year complete, I spent the summer shadowing in a family practice's office in Boston, driving to and from Arkham on the weekends. My parents asked if they could meet West. When I asked him to visit, he asked "what for?" and I dropped the subject.

West divided his time between an intensive course to become a certified mortuary technician, and at a shooting range, practicing. Once, while I was spending the weekend at the Arkham apartment, we woke to a scratching sound under the window, and I had to practically restrain West from rushing out with his pistol. "It could be a cat!" I wailed.

He settled for sitting by the window until first light, when we discovered that the siding underneath had been scratched at, and partly torn away by claws that were too big for a cat. This caused me some insomnia in the following weeks, but it never happened again.

* * *

In our third year we began clinical rotations, which took us out of the lecture halls and into Miskatonic's tiny hospital. To my surprise, West's contentious debates with Doctor Halsey - who had made Dean of the medical school following the sudden heart attack of his predecessor - did not end with our departure from the classroom. Instead of throwing a faculty party once his most rancorous student had left his lectures, Dean Halsey actively sought West out to continue their debates one-on-one. They began to meet weekly for coffee, and made themselves a nuisance at both of Arkham's all-night diners.

On the few occasions I joined them, Dean Halsey left energized and excited, but West usually was enraged. He'd rant into the night about Dean Halsey's pedantry, and his obstinance in adhering to obsolete ethics. The Dean would also berate West's chain smoking, which sent West practically frothing at the mouth.

Despite West's temper, Dean Halsey adored him, and although he'd never stoop to puffing West's grades, he did agree to put West and me on the same rotation at the hospital. It was just as well - West was too snappish at the other students, and I was best at tempering his utter lack of bedside manner. I certainly didn't complain, as our clinic hours were such that if we hadn't been on rotations together, I would only have seen him for a few hours a day. As it was, we were constantly in each others' company, and still I found myself wanting more.

* * *

Our rotation work continued uneventfully until November, when the news media began its yearly warning about this or that strain of influenza. All of us at the school rolled our eyes at the increasingly hysterical news releases, which we considered an annual portent of clickbait fearmongering. We were quickly proven wrong.

The first severe cases of the H1N2 subtype were reported in December out of a hospital in Portland Maine, beginning a rush of vaccine-seekers who surged into Miskatonic's teaching hospital _en masse_. As we later learned, however, the vaccine provided in that particular year was ineffective against the strain of flu tearing its way through the population. On December 12th, there was one reported death - an elderly woman in Ipswich. Two days later, there were five deaths scattered across New England. In another week, there were one hundred and thirty-five deaths across the United States. By the new year, the number of nationwide fatalities had ballooned to two thousand, six hundred and fourteen, a fraction of the deaths that ensued in Central America and Southeast Asia. In the first week of January, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic at a level unheard of since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The disease hit Arkham especially hard. As is usual with influenza, it chiefly victimized infants and the elderly, the latter of which were especially plentiful in that mouldering mill town. The teaching hospital was transformed into a clinic for those who had no one else to care for them, or who were too far gone to stay at home. The students worked double shifts, and slept in makeshift cots in disused laboratories - the only places where equipment made it unsafe to keep patients.

West, of course, worked triple shifts, and assisted in the morgue, as he'd received his mortuary tech certification by the end of the summer. Arkham was suddenly inundated with corpses that had to be disposed of quickly and without ceremony, and I could sense West's impatience at not being able to conduct mortuary services without supervision - as a technician, he had to be under supervision by the mortician at all times. I breathed a surreptitious sigh of relief whenever West would stalk back to our side-by-side cots in a supply closet, deploring that he hadn't had a chance to try out the reformulation of his solution. Lying there in the dark, West groused about finally having enough material to work with, but no opportunity to take any action. Any time I'd fall asleep, he'd raise his voice until I responded, then berate me for getting bored with him.

West's desire to try his experiment again increased with both the time elapsed since our last try, and with the number of bodies that passed through the hospital morgue. I was not so eager. We had barely escaped the last attempt with our lives, not to mention our medical reputations, and that was due to sheer luck. I was also uneasy about the thing we'd created - where it was, what it might do to us or someone else. But seeing so much destruction and death around us that winter softened my resolve - if so many could be cut out of life so arbitrarily, why shouldn't West try to bring them back again? I pondered this in the dark after West had wound himself down with his speeches, his postulates, his rants. But if I want to admit the truth to myself, the deciding factor for me wasn't any noble desire to save lives. No, I wanted to see West succeed. Not for the obvious professional adulation and public fame that would ensue, but to see West happy - finally happy - in his achievement.

Once, on one of our infrequent breaks in the supply closet, I asked him "why do you want to do it?"

I braced myself for a caustic reply, but West only sighed and turned over on his cot. "To show I'm right," he said.

"To show whom?"

"Myself."

* * *

The pandemic went into its second month in February, and our endurance began to break down. Two students collapsed from exhaustion, fifteen contracted the flu and were added to the patient lists. Lectures for first and second year students were suspended, and every professor who was also a doctor was conscripted to assist at the hospital. There was still no word on when an effective vaccine would be distributed - any day now, the pharmaceutical companies said, and my fellow students and doctors alike gave little skeptical sighs with every day that passed. Most of the elderly patients caught pneumonia atop the flu virus, creating a hospital-wide bacterial epidemic.

Even West began to show signs of strain, though this was mostly restricted to his dropping to sleep immediately upon going on break, as oppose to his usual habit of working out his excess energy by chewing on pens and lecturing me about corpses. During rounds, he showed no signs of fatigue, and seemed to be running on sheer willpower. In addition, his prickly and blunt manner made him a favorite of the tough, grizzled former mill workers who were dragged in for treatment by frantic children and grandchildren. Students in other rounds were infuriated when those hoary relics demanded to see "Doctor West," despite the fact (which they took pains to emphasize) that West was a student, not a doctor. The other students took to bursting into our supply closet and fetching West on his break whenever a patient asked for him, and he irritated them still more by keeping his temper, thanking them, and rising immediately to treat the patient who had requested him.

All of this only raised Dean Halsey's esteem for West. The Dean had joined the ranks of doctors conscripted to serve the influx of patients, and he was put in charge of West's and my rotation group for the second week of February. The week would turn out to be the worst of the pandemic, as the influenza and pneumonia cases were at their most numerous and severe.

We all worked doggedly, barely speaking to each other, taking allergy histories and dispensing antivirals and antibiotics. Dean Halsey began to suppress a cough. He and I were both trying to keep up with West's sleepless energy - I was more successful at it, having been accustomed to West's schedule, but the effort hit Dean Halsey very hard. His cough got louder, and his breathing came in gasps. But West continued to plow through breaks in our shifts, and Doctor Halsey was determined to keep up with him. I finally succumbed and took my break in the supply closet alone. When I woke up, West and Dean Halsey were coming down the hall. The Dean was gasping and coughing. West looked the same as ever, save for the inky circles under his eyes.

"Go ahead with Doctor Steiner's shift," West said when they reached me. "We're on break."

"Sure - go ahead and use my cot, Dean Halsey," I said. The Dean gave me a wan smile, and lay down. I stopped West outside and closed the door.

"He needs to get examined," I hissed. "That cough sounds like an infection - he can't be treating patients with that!"

"I know," said West. He pushed a matted tangle of hair off his forehead. "I'll see if I can talk him into it after we get some sleep - okay?"

West was so unusually obedient, that I granted him an indulgent smile. "And a shower," I said.

West smirked. "Wake us up in four hours, okay?" He kissed me on the mouth once, then went into the closet.

I worked an eight hour shift with Doctor Steiner's group, deciding to incur West's likely wrath in exchange for allowing him four additional hours of rest, and giving Doctor Halsey some time to recover. None of the students in my rotation had the nerve to wake West for the patients who requested him so long as I was around to stop them, and by the end of the shift, I was rather pleased with myself for having engineered what amounted to a full night's sleep for the two.

Before embarking on my second shift, I broke off from the group and headed for the supply closet to wake the two up, thinking of what best to say to calm West down about oversleeping, and how to get Dean Halsey into an examination room as a patient rather than a doctor as soon as possible.

I opened the closet door quietly, so as not to shock them as they lay still on their cots, and put my hand on Dean Halsey's shoulder.

"Dean Halsey?" I said softly, shaking him a little. He didn't move. I shook harder. "Dean Halsey?"

The slice of light coming in through the closet door was just enough that I could see a faint glitter where his face must be. I gave up trying not to shock the two sleepers awake, and flipped on the overhead light.

Dean Halsey's eyes were open, and bulging slightly out of his head. His mouth was open, his tongue protruding.

I choked, then nearly screamed as a hand close around my wrist - West's. He sat up on his cot and blinked as I tried to breathe more quietly. "What?" West said.

"He's dead - Dean Halsey," I gasped. "Look." I pointed, unnecessarily, to the Dean's bulging eyes.

West stood up, felt for Dean Halsey's wrist, his neck, his chest, as I watched.

"We have to get Doctor Steiner," I whispered.

West said nothing but straightened, eyes narrowed. Then slowly he dipped a hand into his coat pocket and produce a large capped syringe.

"No," I hissed. West met my eyes, but he began to unscrew the cap.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Last time," I breathed, "that thing… we can't turn Dean Halsey into a _thing_."

"It might be different," West mused. "I told you that I've made a lot of improvements." He tapped the syringe with a thumbnail, pressed until a single drop of clear fluid appeared at the tip of the needle. "And Dean Halsey was the most intelligent man I knew."

I boggled at West. After all the time he'd spent railing and raving about Dean Halsey's ignorance and close mindedness, West's statement struck me dumb. West looked at me, puzzled. "What?" he said. "He was my favorite professor."

"You just want him to admit that you're right," I whispered, too quiet for West to hear as he emptied the contents of his syringe into Dean Halsey's neck. I circled, squeezing between the side of Dean Halsey's cot and the shelving behind, so as to get a better look at his face. For several moments, nothing happened.

I looked up at West. "How long-" was all I could get out before the corpse on the bed began to scream. I joined in.

There was nowhere to run this time. I backed into the shelves behind me, knocking myself on the head and back. The corpse on the cot began to convulse, bouncing higher and higher on the flimsy mattress, eyes rolling back, red-flecked foam frothing out of its mouth.

It stopped screaming as abruptly as it had started, and with a speed that shocked me, flipped itself over to crouch on the cot on all fours. It surveyed the closet for a moment, and then, with a howl, threw itself at West.

The motion of the corpse leaping pushed the cot into my stomach, and I doubled over, gasping. By the time I was able to catch my breath, the thing that had been Dean Halsey had West by the throat, and was slamming him into the shelving on the other side of the closet - once, twice, three times. The plastic boxes of equipment fell, bursting open and raining bandages, tongue depressors and instruments. The thing slammed West again, and this time, I heard a loud crack. I found my voice, and screamed again.

The thing started at the sound and dropped West, who crumpled on the ground, not moving. It stared at me with Dean Halsey's eyes, puffing foul, moist breath into my face through Dean Halsey's mouth. Then, slowly, it climbed onto West's cot, preparing for another leap - this time me.

A sudden clatter outside the closet caught the thing's attention, and it snapped its head to the slightly open door. It made a low gurgling sound, and sputum dripped from its jaws onto the cot, staining the sheet pink. Then the thing lept - not at me, but toward the door, bursting it open and scattering Doctor Steiner's students, who had come running when they had heard the screams from the closet.

Now it was the group of students who began screaming, and I heard running steps moving away. In the confusion, I had the presence of mind to jump over the cot and, grab West's empty syringe from the floor, and thrust it into my own pocket. I managed this just before the remaining students turned from watching Dean Halsey sprint down the corridor, and settled their attention on West and me.

Doctor Steiner was the first to enter the closet. Before she could say anything, I gasped "I'm fine - help him!" She looked to where I was pointing, and so did the other students. The sight was frankly gruesome. West was unconscious, face down on the floor, his right shoulder jerked back at an unlikely angle. A pool of blood was widening under his face.

"Oh my God," I started to sob, "he'll choke-"

"Take him!" Doctor Steiner snapped, jerking her head. The two closest students, faces blanched with fear, came in and started lifting West into one of the cots, hampered a bit by the lack of space.

"Come on," 'Doctor Steiner said, taking my arm in one hand, steering me out of the closet and into the hallway. From there, I could hear more screaming from some distant part of the hospital. It sounded as though it was coming from under water. Doctor Steiner heard it too, and disbelief spread across her face as she listened to chaos erupting down the ward. She turned back to me. "What the hell just happened?"

It's funny how one can be completely hysterical and completely rational - to the point of being calculating - at the same time. The sobbing, gulping part of me continued to sob and gulp, but the crafty part - the one whose first move had not been even to see if West was all right, but to hide the evidence of our culpability - told Doctor Steiner the truth. But not all of it.

It was a simple story. I'd gone to wake West and Dean Halsey up for their shift, shaken Dean Halsey, and he'd woken up unhinged, and attacked. No one would have believed it unless they'd seen the thing sprint down the hall, howling - and by now, half the hospital had seen just that. Shaken patients and crying children roamed the halls looking for someone who could tell them that everything would be all right. The thing had torn through the main lobby, out the doors, and out into the night, fortunately not doing anything more than frightening those who had seen it.

"Please," I found myself praying while I waited for West to be released from the ER, "let it wind down. Let it just keel over and die. Let it run out." But run out of what, I didn't know.

It took West so long to get out of treatment that I was forced to return to my shift with Doctor Steiner's group before I could see him. The students working with me gave me cautious looks, but didn't ask me anything. Doctor Steiner, for her part, seemed more concerned that the most efficient student the school had was not only out of commission, but also taking up valuable resources by needing treatment himself.

I resisted the urge to ask Doctor Steiner whether she was worried about Dean Halsey, not wanting to indicate any possible culpability for his current condition. Besides, I thought, Doctor Steiner was like me. She didn't want to think about the thing that had once been the dean of the medical school. She too wanted it to disappear.

But it didn't.

I came back from my double shift to find that West had been released from the ER and rolled back to the supply closet. "No other room," the attending had snapped when I'd asked. At least it was private. I curled up on my own cot to assess the damage.

West's nose - the source of the disturbingly large pool of blood I'd smeared across the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to mop up - looked battered but not broken. His right arm looked worse, and was tucked across his torso in a sling.

West opened one eye and looked at me. "Hey," he said.

"Hey. How are you feeling?"

He sighed, closed his eye. "Codeineous," he slurred.

"Rough time?"

"Clavicle fracture and dislocated shoulder. Had to pop the socket before they set the fracture. It was…" he gave a nasty sounding snicker, and didn't finish. I didn't know what to say, so I lay silent.

"Oh," he said, "also MBT."

"A concussion?"

"That's imprecise."

"So's MBT."

"_Touche_."

"Do you remember what happened?"

West opened both his eyes at this, drew in a long, hissing breath. "No. Not much."

So I told him, up to the point where the creature disappeared into the night after escaping the hospital. West lay silent after I finished.

"What is it, West?"

"What d'you mean?"

"The… thing. It's not Dean Halsey anymore, but what is it? Is it a monster? A zombie?"

West gave the nasty snicker again. "Zombie? What made you think of that?"

"I don't know - it was dead. Now it isn't. But it's not human."

"Yes it is. It's just… damaged. We got there too late. It wasn't quite fresh enough."

"But-"

"No. Zombies are _voudon_."

"..are Voodoo?"

"No. _Voudon_ is a religion. Hoodoo is…" he lost the word in the narcotic fog, searched, found another. "Bullshit."

"You mean magic."

"Same thing. Religion too, now that I think about it."

"Go to sleep, West."

West, obedient again, closed his eyes and was quickly asleep, judging from his even breathing. As for me, I lay awake, thinking about how the only truly modern word for life, or death, or love, of God, or religion, or magic was "chemical."

* * *

I must have dozed, because a few hours later we were both awakened by a knock on the closet door - Arkham police investigators come to take our statement about the attack, now that West was deemed to be sufficiently able to respond. I, under the guise of being worried about West's health, was able to lead the conversation, with West nodding and corroborating my story. The questioning was all rather perfunctory, and as the officers turned to leave, I asked whether there was any news about the Dean. The officers looked at each other, then at me. "I guess you haven't seen the morning paper," one said. I stared at him blankly. They took the opportunity to leave, while I turned to West, horrified.

"Don't move," I said when I could speak again. West rolled his eyes at me, but stayed still as I dashed out of the door and followed the officers down the hall.

A cluster of students had gathered in one of the halls, heads bent and whispering. They looked up as I approached, seemingly nervous. One of the girls giggled shrilly - which, based on the others' reactions, was the wrong thing to do. I held out my hand, and one of them thrust the newspaper into it. The group dispersed, leaving me there. I began to read the article, bile rising in my throat, glad that it did not include pictures.

After I finished, I strode down the hall and jerked the supply closet door open, shoving the newspaper at West. "A night watchman was beaten to death," I said.

"Don't wave that thing in my face," West said, snatching the paper with his good arm.

"At Christchurch Cemetery. His face was ripped off - there wasn't anything left! No skin, no nose, no cheeks-"

West smoothed the paper slowly over his knees, affecting indifference.

"It used its teeth to do it," I said.

"Hm. And it's definitely-"

"The watchman taking the morning shift saw it running away before he found the body," I interrupted. "He described it. Balding, dark beard, white coat. It's… _it_. The Dean."

"Interesting," West replied. He began to read the article.

"Wait!" I said in frustration. "Do you really - I mean, don't you feel any _responsibility_ for-"

It was a stupid question, and we both knew it. West lifted his eyes from the newspaper and stared at me, his eyes so flat and cold that I could hear the "chick, chick" as they met mine.

I stared back, silent, conscious only of an overwhelming despair at the knowledge that not only did West feel no responsibility, but would have done it all over again, knowing the consequences. We stared at each other that way for what seemed like a long time, until the closet door opened behind me.

It was the girl who had encouraged me my first year - I'd already forgotten her name.

"Hi," she said, "Doctor Steiner said come find you. The vaccines finally came."

West and I were both staring at the girl now. She squirmed, cleared her throat.

"So," she said, "there's an announcement for everybody in town to come in and get inoculated here. We're setting up a clinic in the lobby and we need all hands."

"I-I'd better go then," I stammered, lowering my eyes and grateful for the excuse to leave the closet. I stepped out and followed the girl to the lobby, resisting all attempts to enter into conversation with her.

Once assembled, the students, doctors and hospital staff set the lobby and connecting halls of the hospital up into "vaccination stations," and set to work as what seemed like the whole town streamed in to receive immunization.

I worked another double shift, which passed in a blur of exposed forearms, screaming children and jostling figures who wouldn't queue properly. During the afternoon, while I manned one of the stations, a skinny middle-aged man sat to receive his injection. When he rolled up his sleeve, however, I saw that he had a fresh puncture mark already, and gummy residue from where he'd removed his bandage. I looked up at him.

"You've had your shot already," I said.

"I'm from the _Arkham Advertiser_, he said. "I had a hell of a time finding you - this place is a madhouse."

"You've had your shot already," I repeated. "You can't have another."

The man flipped a small voice recorder from a pocket, clicked a button. "You're the girlfriend, right?" he said, " You saw it happen?"

I stared at the recorder. "It's dangerous to get too much of this vaccine, sir. And there's a line."

"The attack," the man pressed. "You saw Doctor Halsey attack your boyfriend, Herbert West."

"There are a lot of people behind you, sir," I replied. "Please - you can't have another shot. Please get out of line." The people standing behind the man began to grumble.

"I just need one moment of your time," the man said, handing me a business card. "Perhaps we could met after your shift, and you could tell me-"

"NO!" I screamed, standing up, "_GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LINE!_" I threw the card in his face, and it flapped undramatically to the floor. The point had been made, though, and the shocked-looking reporter slunk away, while several of the waiting patients applauded.

I fully expected to be taken aside and lectured by Doctor Steiner, but she instead motioned to hospital security, who hustled the man out while I got back to my inoculations.

The sun set. People looked nervously at the reddening sky, and left lines in which they'd been waiting for hours, unwilling to stay out after dark. An assurance from the doctors that the hospital would be open for more vaccinations at first light caused stampede for the door, clearing the lobby in a matter of minutes. The effect was frightful, and the ashen faces of my fellow students and doctors showed that they felt it as much as I did. Doctor Steiner briskly herded those of us in her group, and we embarked on a round to check the status of patients overnighting at the hospital. By midnight, when my second shift ended, I was stumbling and felt sick myself.

I didn't know what to do or where to go - back to West? The thought of being stared at as I'd been this morning was unendurable. Pull a cot into one of the labs with the other students? They would stare too, and what would I talk to them about? Find somewhere to be alone and think? I was tired of thinking, and afraid to be alone. I began to sniffle a bit, thinking of Dean Halsey, kind Dean Halsey, who was always so funny, and happy to verbally spar with West - and now, through the theories he had scoffed at as impossible, had been turned into a monster.

When I turned into the corridor that housed the supply closet, I saw that West was leaning in the doorway, waiting. As I got closer, I could see how tired he looked, how glazed his eyes were. More codeine, probably.

I stopped a few feet away, wondering what to say. Eventually I decided on the truth.

"I don't know what to do," I said to West.

"What do you want?" he asked. Reasonable question. I pondered it for a short time.

"Nothing," I finally said.

"Then," he replied, "you might as well stay."

And it was true, and I felt suddenly peaceful And I didn't have to consider how I could go on after having known someone like him. And he put his good arm around me, and a delicious oblivion hollowed me out to my fingertips, and I kissed him, and nothing else mattered.

* * *

The shipments of vaccines continued, and within two days, the city of Arkham had been inoculated against H1N2. The influx of patients to the hospital ebbed. The patients in the hospital left on their feet, not in a hearse. After a week, our schedules calmed so that we began to work single shifts again, and got to sleep at home. The pandemic had ended just as a new, and far more frightening plague began.

On the night after the attack on the cemetery watchman, a policeman was killed, his throat ripped out and his thymus missing. The night after that, a pair of men going home from a bar were found in an alley. One man's neck was broken; the other's head had been smashed in. The thing that had done it had gnawed a chunk of flesh out of the second man's substantial belly.

The police mobilized a full force, and requested assistance from neighboring cities. They imposed a curfew for the residents of Arkham and commenced an all-out manhunt.

The news media swarmed the town, breathlessly reporting the grisly details. Reporters from the television channels, the _Boston Globe_ and _Herald_, the _Arkham Advertiser_, and a flashy tabloid that hitherto had featured news stories about a creature infesting the waters off the coast of Innsmouth named "Shark-Boy," sought comment from the hospital, school, West and me. The hospital and school refused to comment about the Dean, or grant reporters access to its students. As a result, so long as we were working and sleeping at the hospital, West and I were safe. Once the flu had dissipated, and our schedules cleared, however, we began to be hounded. Reporters waited in the hospital parking lot for us to enter or leave, and shouted questions, which we ignored. We unplugged our telephone and let the apartment buzzer ring unheeded, to the increasing consternation of the neighbors.

The papers and blogs howled about the hospital's stonewalling, and lack of information about the rampaging Dean. West and I, as the first victim and witness respectively, were identified as refusing to comment. This did not keep the tabloid from printing a largely invented character study of West based on his contemptuous dismissal of its reporters. West bought the issue and read it aloud, snickering at the more damning sections. Afterwards, he lay back on the floor, holding a cigarette out for me to light for him, and said "I would have given an interview to Shark-Boy."

I lit the cigarette but didn't laugh.

A little over a week after the men were killed in the alley, and the imposition of the curfew, the thing broke into a house and slaughtered a family of five. Parts of each family member had been torn off, and the smallest child had disappeared entirely. The news reporters abruptly lost all interest in West and me, and issued a gruesome series of articles and televisions reports on what they termed the "Arkham Horror." West read the first Arkham Advertiser report, pursed his lips and said, "over a week. It must have been hungry."

I locked myself in the bathroom, hyperventilating, until West managed to snap the lock, forced me to take one of his leftover codeine, and put me to bed.

The night after the break-in, and for three nights after that, the full force of the Arkham police department flooded the streets of the city. No one slept due to the strobing searchlights sweeping across stairs and into lawns and windows.

"They won't find him tonight," said West, peering out of the blinds at the searchers.

"Why not?" I asked. He turned and looked at me, silent.

"Oh," I said, realizing. "The child."

"Sort of like takeout," he agreed. It took another codeine to get me to sleep that night.

* * *

On the third night, they caught the thing. It was trying to break into the back of a house half a mile from the cemetery when a group of police searches came upon the scene with their searchlights, and ambushed it. It seemed oblivious to their presence as they screamed at it to freeze, one of the police said in an interview. Instead of shooting it, they physically subdued it with nightsticks until it could be handcuffed. The thing shrieked and struggled, but it didn't attack them. When they got it to a prison cell, however, it began throwing himself at the concrete walls, still shrieking. As a consequence, it was removed from the cell and taken to Sefton Asylum, a large, castle-like structure on the outskirts of town with a nasty reputation for patient neglect and general disorder and decay.

West and I followed the news reports about the thing closely. It was positively identified as Dean Halsey, but a grotesque change had taken over the Dean's features. The skin on its face and body appeared to be rotting away, and the flesh on its fingers had been scraped nearly to the bone. It did not appear to feel pain, and it took massive amounts of anesthesia to sedate the thing. When in a cell, it threw himself against the walls - though they, unlike those in the jail cell, were padded.

A psychological evaluation was immediately begun, and almost instantly concluded that the thing was unfit to stand trial for its crimes by reason of insanity, though none of the attending doctors could agree on a diagnosis. A medical examination was abandoned after the thing woke suddenly from heavy sedation, attacking and injuring one of the doctors. After one brief visit, Dean Halsey's family voluntarily committed the thing to the asylum indefinitely, and moved out of Arkham as fast as they could. Thus, the once-revered Dean of Miskatonic University School of Medicine became the ravening creature known as the "Arkham Horror."

After reading me the news of the thing's commitment, West folded the newspaper and stared at the ceiling for a full minute without speaking.

"Do you know what the worst part about this is?" West finally asked.

"Tell me," I said.

"He wrote my main letter of recommendation for residency applications. I'll need another one now, and it won't be as good."

I thought about this, staring at the ceiling myself, my thigh pressed against West's in the narrow bed.

"You can find another," I said. "Doctor Steiner likes you, now that you've joined our group.

"She's not exactly effluvient in her praise," West muttered.

I rolled over, took his face in my hands and kissed him on one eyebrow. "Don't worry about it right now. Come on, we have an early shift tomorrow."

We settled, switched off the lights.

"I can finally sleep now that that thing's locked up," I murmured.

I did not.


	3. Chapter 3

They told me to stop writing today. They caught me writing with one hand and pulling my hair with the other. "Regressing," they said. Getting worse instead of better. That the writing is a trigger. They said they might cut my hair, and I cried and promised I'd stop. But I haven't. It's hard to stop writing now that I've gotten started.

I haven't shown them, of course. Every time I finish a page, I hide it under my mattress. Part of me thinks that I've been hiding the truth for West for so long, I can't start divulging it now. And part of me knows that if they saw what I've been writing, they'd - well, I don't know what they'd do. But they wouldn't believe me.

I'm not complaining. Like I said, it's nice here. I can take walks outside if I want. I'm not locked in a cell the way I would have been at Sefton Asylum. The way that thing that had been Dean Halsey was locked up, batting itself endlessly against the padded walls.

Of course, Dean Halsey isn't locked up any more. And that doesn't help me sleep any.

* * *

Our fourth year of medical school was too busy for us to try any more of West's experiments. We had clinicals at the teaching hospital, and were applying for residency programs across the country. West had his eye on a surgical residency in Amherst that was very prestigious. He tried to bully me into applying to surgical residencies as well, but on that point, I stood firm. I'd gone to medical school wanting a family practice, and a residency in family medicine was my first choice. However, I did acquiesce to proximity, and chose Amherst as my first match. West grumbled, but admitted that applying to different programs would increase our chances of getting into the same hospital.

West's first goal in getting a residency was to keep the two of us together - a goal that I considered to be nearly impossible due to the manner in which medical students are matched to positions - that is, by computer algorithm rather than any conscious choice. I could hardly complain, of course, as I couldn't imagine having to endure a residency in another hospital - or worse, another state - from West. But his motives were more oblique than mine. I finally got up the nerve to ask him why he was so set on us getting a residency together, and he just smiled and said "we have a lot of work to do."

I didn't sleep for a week after he said that, and asked no more questions.

One afternoon, as we sat drafting applications, West turned to me and said "we should probably get married."

My mouth went dry, and for several moments, I couldn't speak. I finally managed to sputter out "why?"

He shrugged. "Married residents are more likely to get matched together," he said. "Not by much, but it could help."

"Oh. All right," I said, and we both went back to our applications.

Objectively, I was aware that as far as proposals go, this one would be considered disappointing by most women. But until that day, I'd never much thought about getting married. Now, faced with this curt, businesslike proposal, I was touched, rather than disappointed.

We applied for the license the next day, and a few weeks later were married at the Essex Superior Court. We were in scrubs, fresh from a night shift, and refused the offer to have our picture taken under the cheap arch entwined with dusty plastic flowers set up in the hallway. We had no rings. The one thing I did do was immediately apply to change my name to West.

It was a week before I thought that I ought to call my parents to tell them I'd gotten married. The shock my mother displayed at the news told me how far from the norm I had strayed. They insisted on us coming to Boston for a weekend visit - an unmitigated disaster. West only agreed to go after being threatened with divorce, and a change in my top residency pick to Los Angeles. He greeted my parents' attempts at enthusiasm with stony silence, and spent most of the weekend on the porch chain smoking and working on his residency applications on my laptop.

My parents were furious, and after a painful dinner during which West ignored their small talk and barely touched my mother's (admittedly terrible) chicken Kiev, she hissed "is it too much to ask him to act like a human being?"

I didn't answer, and didn't relax until we had driven out of the city, and were headed back to Arkham.

After we'd submitted our matching sets of residency applications, we had a brief calm before we embarked on our interviews. We both grew increasingly twitchy as Match Day grew ever closer.

The students were given Match Day off, which, for West, only made things worse. Without an outlet for his excess energy, he spent the day chain smoking and pacing through the apartment, until I started coughing and kicked him out into the courtyard.

The Match Day ceremony at Miskatonic University was a formal affair, which further agitated West, as he abhorred all things ceremonial. I had to force him into the suit I'd bought for him, and he resisted all the attempts I made to soothe him prior to the ceremony itself.

At the ceremony, we were lined up in alphabetical order (a benefit of changing my name, ha ha), and those who had been matched to a residency were handed sealed envelopes. This, I reflected while the envelopes were being handed out, seemed needlessly cruel to the students who had not been matched,and who would begin to scramble for the remaining positions tomorrow. This thought was quickly extinguished once an envelope was placed in my hand.

At the signal, we tore the envelopes open at the same time. The text on my letter seemed to run before my eyes as I searched for the words I desperately wanted to see. My breath caught when I found them all - Family Medicine, Amherst.

I turned to West who, on seeing the expression on my face, broke into his magnificent cloudburst smile. I fairly shuddered at the sheer joy of it, and could only think that despite the strange, unsettling events of my years as a medical student, this moment was worth them all.

We spent the next months in a blur of finishing clinical work at Miskatonic for good, and preparing to move and begin our residencies. For me, the blur was mostly happy, as I was thrilled by the prospect of settling into something approaching cozy domesticity with West. It would be demanding, certainly, but we weren't the sort of pair to lounge around. We'd be lean, hungry, driven - together. And I began to develop the hope that, with the punishing schedule of a resident, and the no doubt fascinating things he'd be learning during his surgical training, West would eventually abandon his strange experiments with corpses, and turn his ambitions to the living.

I was wrong, of course. I was stupid even to think it.

* * *

It was the house that made me realize that nothing was going to change with West.

He'd disappeared after his shift one Tuesday afternoon, absconding with my car. I didn't particularly mind his taking the car, as my plan for the day was to take a hot bath and sleep, which I did. I missed him next to me in bed, though - the way I could lean my forehead between his shoulderblades, the way he'd turn to curl one arm around my waist. I found it difficult to sleep without him.

(still do.)

I'd tossed and turned myself into exhaustion, then woke on Wednesday morning, late, to find him back, lighting a cigarette with a smug expression.

"Hey," I said, blinking.

"Hey," he replied. "I got us a house."

I sat up, the bedsheets pooling around my waist. "A house?" I repeated.

"In Amherst, for when we move. It's perfect," he said.

Perfect for what, I would find out when we finished out our last year of medical school, packed our things, and drove west.

(ha ha.)

I hated the house from the moment I saw it. It was an old farmhouse that stood alone at the end of a winding road, in the middle of land seemingly so fallow, no one had ever bothered to attempt to build on it after the farm had ceased operations. Our nearest neighbor was three quarters of a mile away. The house was old and dilapidated, and I got the rather cliched sensation that the front of it looked a bit like a face. There were the large, empty windows on the second floor, peering out onto the winding path that approached it, and the front porch sagged like a leering, toothless mouth.

West was nearly beside himself with excitement when we first drove up - me driving, him directing. "Well?" he asked, when I'd parked. "What do you think?"

He must have seen my expression fall at the mere sight of the place, because his own face hardened. He busied himself with lighting a cigarette - even though I'd asked him not to smoke with the car windows up.

"It's just a bit - run down, don't you think?" I asked.

He didn't answer for three drags on the cigarette. I started to hold my breath.

"If it's not _good_ enough-"

"I didn't say that-"

"It's what we can afford on our salary. Unless you want mommy and daddy to-"

"I didn't _say_ that!"

He responded only by jetting two streams of smoke from both nostrils. I realized then how dangerously close to the edge I was - how easily he could tell me to leave him there, and drive away, find a new apartment, and not to speak to him again. The fear I felt at the mere thought of West leaving me was more than any I felt upon looking at the sagging face of the house.

I took a breath, ignoring how it seemed to catch in my throat. "Will you show me around?"

I hated the inside of the house more than the outside. It was musty, mildewed, filled with dust that seemed impossible to get rid of. The ceilings were too low, the hallways too narrow, the rooms too small. Every room seemed to squeeze my chest a bit, and they became worse the further I ventured into the house.

But the absolute worst part came when West paused beside a door near the kitchen and said "this is the best part." He opened the door upon a narrow stairway, leading down.

The basement.

In contrast to the rest of the house, the basement was vast. It was dark and cool, seeming to have unplumbed recesses that couldn't be explored in only one venture. I looked around it, a strange choking sensation in my throat.

"For the lab," West said, consolingly. "For our work." He put his arms around my waist and kissed me on one cheek. "We're going to prove them all wrong."

I didn't answer.

* * *

In med school, veteran doctors delighted in telling students horror stories about how bad their residencies were. The reality was worse. Nothing anyone had said could have prepared me for the sheer exhaustion of the work, the number of hours spent at the hospital, the interminable movement from patient to patient, the tiny snatches of rest we were permitted before we had to get up and do everything over again.

This was the first time since I'd met West that our schedules were nearly incompatible. We managed well enough that we were able to get each other to the hospital in our single car, but for most of the days - and the nights - when we worked, we were entirely separated. We ate meals, went to sleep, and woke again, still at the hospital.

Still, I look fondly back on that time as a period of being happy. I was exhausted, of course, and I missed West, but i was secretly pleased that West's residency seemed to sap even his nearly inexhaustible stores of energy. On the rare days when we both were allowed to go home, West barely had the strength to mutter a few words about his day, flop into bed and sleep. I would stay up for as long as I could and pretend that the two of us were just normal junior residents, who had never engaged I recreational corpse resurrection - or, barring that, that West would eventually find a new and less terrifying interest to occupy him.

Our sporadic efforts at home improvement, however, told otherwise. When possible, we engaged both our meager salaries and limited time in attempting to make our ramshackle house a livable space. My efforts started in our bedroom - I scrubbed baseboards, slapped a coat of bright white paint on the walls, put up a set of bright yellow curtains that I deemed "cheerful," and that West didn't notice until I pointed them out to him. West spent his time in the basement.

I didn't have the fear of basements then that I have now, but I still avoided the place as much as I could. Consequently, I only saw the improvements that West made in great leaps. First there was only vast space, and then - a complex lighting system, lab tables, equipment. Some of it was ordered from a medical supply company, and some had been smuggled out of the hospital - West had a genius for theft, he never got caught. When I suggested once that he might not want to risk his job by taking so much equipment by himself, he only looked thoughtful and said, "maybe I'll have you take something next time." I never mentioned it again, for fear he'd follow through on the threat.

A year went by this way, and then two, without West making another attempt at his experiment. He'd begun actively working on an improved formula, and spent any time in the house that he wasn't sleeping shut in the basement with an array of chemicals. I sometimes joined him out of sheer loneliness, and helped as much as I could - talking through the changes West was making, and sometimes proposing improvements on my own. The bad ones were met with a snort, the good ones with silence.

But despite the progress West made with his formula, he still hadn't attempted to use it, for one simple reason - lack of readily available corpses. West's attempts to cultivate a mortician the way he had in Arkham were rebuffed on all sides, and with his residency schedule, he didn't have the time to try working at a funeral home himself. All of this I considered very fortunate, and inwardly prayed that it would continue until West finally lost interest. But I underestimated West's resourcefulness.

He hit on the solution in our third, and last, year of residency. I came back from my shift one morning to find a group of people sitting in our living room. Their shabby clothes and downtrodden expressions showed that they were fellow residents of the impoverished part of town. None of them stood, or said anything to greet me when I walked in. They only looked at me once, faces impassive, then looked away when they decided I wasn't worth spending further time on.

I walked through the room to the back parlor, a disused room that I rarely entered, and found West examining a man stripped down to a yellowing strap style undershirt and shorts. "What the hell?" I snapped.

West stood smoothly, said "would you excuse me?" to the man, took my arm and steered me out of the room, into the kitchen. Only his grip on my arm indicated how angry with me he was.

In the kitchen with the door shut, West turned to me without letting go of my arm. "It's just a few people from town who need some help," he said, his voice low and calm.

"You're not _treating_ them?" I whispered, aghast. "You can't treat them - you'll lose your license before you even _have_ your license!"

"Who's going to catch me?" West said, still completely calm.

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. West's grip on my arm tightened.

"West," I started, my voice strained, "you know I wouldn't say anything-"

"Good," West said, letting go of my arm. "Because I could use a hand in there."

"I've been on call for thirty-six hours, I have to get some sleep."

I winced in advance, waiting for another squeeze on my arm, but West let me go. "Fine," he said. "Good night." He turned and walked back into the parlor, shutting the door behind him.

I went to bed, but didn't sleep - I couldn't, not with all those people in my house. I lay awake, watching the bruise develop into a mottled purple above my elbow. It took three weeks to fade.

This state of affairs continued for several weeks - West treating our indigent neighbors on his off hours, me pretending to ignore what he was doing and locking myself in the bedroom until they were all gone. But one afternoon, when I'd just gotten off an overnight, West started calling me as soon as I walked into the house. I pretended not to hear him until I'd reached the top of the stairs, when I heard his sharp bark of his voice call me from the bottom step.

No good ignoring him now. I turned around and saw him looking up at me, irritated.

"I need some help," he snapped. "I've got a woman in, with a kid. She's complaining of chest pain, but he's sick too - I need you to look at him."

I stood there, hand on the bannister, thinking of refusing, thinking of my license.

West saw the indecision in my face, and held one hand out to me. "Please?" he said, quietly.

I walked down the stairs.

Once in West's makeshift examination room, I recognized both the child and his mother from my ventures to the cheaper grocery store in town - West's expenditures on medical equipment for his illegal practice and basement lab didn't leave much in our budget for groceries. She had a broad, inscrutable face studded with two small eyes spaced too far apart, which she turned to me as I entered the room. The little boy - he couldn't have been more than five, maybe younger - I remember as being particularly noisy, always whining for this or that treat, or shouting for the sheer pleasure of hearing his own voice. Now, though, he wasn't noisy - he was slumped, red-eyed and desultory, against his mother's arm. She ignored him, as did West.

I squatted in front of him, glad I hadn't changed out of my scrubs, so that I at least looked like an official doctor, even in this ramshackle setting. "Hi there," I said to the boy. "Not feeling too good?"

The boy nodded.

"What's your name?"

It took the boy a few moments to open his mouth and croak "Josh."

"Hi Josh, I'm Doctor West. It hurts to talk, huh?"

The boy nodded, looking at the floor.

"Hurts to swallow too?"

Another nod.

"Take him in the kitchen," West said, shoving a kit of equipment at me. I did so, taking Josh by one damp, sticky hand. I sat him in one of the chairs around our table, and set to work.

It didn't take me long to diagnose - it was textbook streptococcal pharyngitis - though I felt a pang of guilt that I couldn't do a throat culture, just to be sure. I gave the mother a prescription (the pad pilfered from the hospital by West, of course) for penicillin, explaining that Josh had to take the full course, even after he'd started feeling better.

"He doesn't have a penicillin allergy, does he?" I asked.

The woman only shrugged, then listened, still impassive, as I explained the symptoms of penicillin allergy. "You'll have to take him to the emergency room if he shows those signs, okay?" I said.

The woman didn't answer, and left after a few minutes with Josh in tow.

I vented my anger at West as we got ready for bed that evening. "If she hadn't been having chest pain, she'd never have brought Josh in at all!" I raged. "It's irresponsible - it's _criminal_! Some people should just - just be sterilized!"

"I agree," West said. He was sitting in bed, having a cigarette and paging through a medical journal without much interest. "But she can't have any more kids any time soon. Her heart's going to give out - I told her she'd have to get treatment at the hospital, but I don't think she will." He took a drag on his cigarette, let it out in a satisfied manner. "One of these days she's just going to keel over and die."

I stopped what I was doing - which was taking off my bra - to turn and stare at West.

"That's what this is about, isn't it?" I said. "You just want someone to die on you - what, so you can have another body?"

West didn't answer - he only raised his eyebrows, as though disappointed that I'd taken so long to figure this out.

"And no one would report it," I continue flatly. "You want another body that no one would care about."

West still didn't answer, and his eyes flicked back to his journal.

I finished taking my clothes off and slid into bed, brain churning over this new information.

"You did that on purpose, didn't you? With the kid? So I'd help?"

At this, West finally closed his journal and put it on his end table. "Are you going to help?" he asked.

I thought about saying no, I really did. But in the end, I never could say no to West for very long.

And so for the next several months, we worked - both at our residencies and at our illegal home practice. I kept telling myself that this was what I wanted, to do good in the community in which I lived, to help people when they were sick. But I wasn't invited to any Sunday dinners, or even a lunch or two. The indigent patients we treated seemed to regard West and I as demigods, who could heal with a touch, but who could not be spoken to on any kind of human level. This certainly seemed to gratify West's ego, but it worried me. I would lie awake after he'd gone to sleep, wondering what would happen if our makeshift practice ever got something wrong, if someone ever died because someone came to us instead of the hospital.

West worried too, but not about the practice. I caught him once, getting up for a shift while I still had a few hours of sleep to go, strapping a holster over his shirt and under his jacket. The visual was so strange that at first I thought I was dreaming.

"What's that for?" I murmured.

West turned to look at me. "Don't you ever hear it?"

"Hear what?"

"The noises. When we're out going to the car in the dark. Don't you ever hear them?"

"Hmm?" I said, not quite able to articulate a full word.

West seemed to pause. "Just for safety," he said. "Go back to sleep." He leaned down and kissed me on the forehead, and I slept.

* * *

On a blustery night in the March of our final year of residency, West and I were woken by a loud knocking at our back door. West was up immediately, and I trailed after him, struggling into a bathrobe and smoothing my hair.

There was a group of five men at the door, and they carried a sixth man among them. At first I wondered why it took so many to carry one, but when the prostrate man came into view, I understood. The man was enormous, easily the biggest I'd ever seen - both in height and girth. His face was broad with a squashed-in nose that was bleeding freely. He looked downright dangerous, as though if he were conscious, he could crush someone's arm his fist. Actually, all of the men looked dangerous to me, but when West started barking orders at them to carry the man into the parlor-cum-examination room, they did as they were told without question.

They got the man onto the table, and West squinted down at him. "What happened?" he asked.

The men looked at each other, and it was some time before one of them spoke up. "Just an... altercation," he said.

West turned his flat eyes on the speaker, and stared him down without saying a word.

"Okay-" the man said, putting up his hands as though to ward West off, even though he was a head taller and twice as wide as my husband. "A little friendly boxing match outside Greenway's."

West flicked his eyes to me, and I understood. Greenway's was a bar on the outskirts of town with a nasty reputation. If the men had been fighting - and likely taking bets on the outcome - they would surely have gotten arrested if they had taken the injured man to the hospital.

"He just collapsed in the middle of the round," the speaker continued. "Hadn't even taken a punch - not right then, anyway - and he just-"

"You should've taken him to the ER," West snapped, irritated. "There's only so much I can do here." He snapped his fingers at me - which I hated, but never could get him to stop doing - and said "cut off his clothes."

I worked fast with the shears, and the men around us became increasingly uncomfortable, shifting and looking into the corners of the room. In any other circumstance, I would have found it funny.

West didn't spend long examining the man before standing, shaking his head. "No," he said, "it's too late. He's gone."

"Oh _shit_," one of the men hissed, his voice sounding quavery and weak, displaying the extent of his cowardice.

West turned his eyes to him - flat, blue, contemptuous. "Go," he said. "We'll take care of him."

My stomach plunged as I heard West say this, but I kept myself still.

"You serious, doc?" another of the men said.

"Yes," West said, "Just go."

The men went, scattering into the dark like cockroaches. We heard their car motor start, then drift into the distance.

"He isn't dead," I said, once the motor faded.

"No, but he will be in a few minutes," West said, snapping off his gloves. "See how shriveled the testes are?"

I looked. I saw. "Steroid abuse?"

"Heavy, and for at least a decade, maybe two. His heart's giving out. I don't think there's anything we could've done even if he had gone to the ER."

I had my doubts about this, but said nothing.

"No time to get him downstairs," West said. "Watch him for me - yell if anything changes." He dashed off, toward the basement lab, leaving me alone with the man in his last few minutes of life.

I watched him as he took shallow little breaths, listened as his faint heartbeats grew more and more arrhythmic. I took the chance of rifling through his clothes, looking for a wallet or identification, but found nothing. Maybe his companions had taken it as a precaution. Maybe they had just stolen it. I wondered where this man had come from, whether he had any family, whether there was anyone wondering where he was or what he was doing. He had an ugly, pugnacious face, but maybe it disguised a kind nature - the kind of man who'd knock down another man for looking at him sideways, but who'd rescue a stray puppy in a storm drain.

I shook my head a little. All of these thoughts were just useless distractions - that's what West would say. If the experiment worked, the man would come back, good as new, and we'd find out all we wanted to know about him. Still, I couldn't resist brushing the hair off his forehead, just once. It was matted, sweaty and thinning, but it was the same blonde as West's, and had the same fine, almost silky texture. The man stirred slightly at my touch, then was still.

When West emerged from the basement, his expression was not the exultant one I was expecting. He looked tense, concerned, and carried two syringes in one hand.

"I'm not sure this'll be enough," he said, setting the syringes - _click click_ - on a table. "He's so huge, and his body mass has got to be-" West cut off, pinching a bit of the man's torso in his fingers. "Do you think we have time to weigh him, at least?"

"I - don't know," I said, balking a bit at the indecision in West's voice. "It'd take both of us to get him off the table, and even then-"

West shook his head, taking the man's pulse. "No time," he said. "This will have to do."

We waited, and in only a few minutes, the huge man's heart stopped in his chest. I waited a few precious seconds to make sure there would be no further heartbeats before saying "now." West plunged his syringe into the man's neck, and after a moment's hesitation, the second syringe as well.

We waited. I held my breath, hovering inches above the boxer's face, searching for the eyelash flutter or nostril twitch that would indicate the first signs of life. Nothing happened.

I waited until I couldn't hold my breath any more, then let it out, slowly. I breathed in, then out again. Still nothing.

We waited for an hour. West started to pace, then lit a cigarette, something he'd never done in the examination room before. I alternately watched him and the corpse, waiting for something - anything - to happen. Nothing did.

I waited another half hour before I dared say anything. "West," is what I said, "I don't think it's going to-"

West threw his most recent cigarette butt into a corner and ran one hand through his hair. "We have to get rid of it," he said.

I shut my eyes, heaved a sigh. "No - I can't, I'm on call in the morning, I have to get some sleep-"

West lit another cigarette. "We still have to get rid of him. Before morning."

I stared hopelessly at the massive body on the table before us, wondering how to say no.

What I said was "I'll bring the car around."

I can't quite remember how we managed it. I remember being cold. I remember that the ground in the woods behind the house was frozen, and that it took us ages to make a shallow dip in the earth that was big enough for the man's enormous frame. I remember that by the end of it my hands were raw and bleeding through my gloves after carrying a load of twigs and nettles to cover the freshly turned earth, camouflaging it to match the rest of the thicket.

I remember West saying not to worry, no one would come looking for the man, not here, and in the spring when the ground warmed up, we'd come back and do a better job of it. I was too tired to argue, or even to respond. I only went to fetch another load of twigs.

By the time we got back to the house the sun was coming up. I had just enough time to take a shower and bandage my hands before I had to leave for the hospital, casting one envious glance at West, who had a forty-eight hour leave, and was already sound asleep.

I got through twenty-four hours of my shift before my resolve began to break down. Even with a five hour sleep allowance in the middle, I began to feel as though the hospital's hallways were wavering, and I had to catch myself in doorframes several times.

Whether fortunately or not, the attending with whom I was working noticed my state, and ordered me to go home, lest I pass something contagious on to the patients under our care. I felt a little ashamed at being called out as weak, but also grateful to be dismissed early, and relieved that I'd be able to get some sleep soon. The relief and gratitude, however, soon dissipated as I drove from the hospital to the farmhouse. Instead, I began to feel an intense anxiety that was heightened when I saw a host of run-down cars parked in the lawn of the house. My first thought was that it was someone looking for the huge boxer we'd buried the morning before - but then, they'd bring police, wouldn't they? And there were no police cars around the house. I walked quickly up the drive, nearly running by the time I got to the porch.

When I opened the front door, I heard raised voices. There were a few scattered people waiting in the living room, but the noises were coming from the parlor-cum-examination room. I dashed in, ignoring those who rose from the dilapidated sofa and chairs to ask how much longer Doctor West was going to be.

The scene in the parlor stopped me cold. West was surrounded by a group of men, one of whom I recognized as having been in the group that brought the boxer to our house. He gave me a guilty glance, then looked back to the group.

It was another man, one I didn't recognize, who was shouting - shouting, I realized, at West. It was a mixture of obscenities and sobs, culminating in a screech - "you killed her - _you killed her_!" I glanced around in confusion until I saw what he meant - a woman lay prone on the examination table beside West, partially obscured from my view by the group of men. I recognized her from her shape and bulk as the woman who'd brought in the child - Josh - with the strep throat. The woman West said would drop dead any day.

"I did no such thing," West said, his voice cold and stiff. "You should have taken her to the hospital, not to me."

The man wailed in despair. "I can't _afford_-"

"That's not my problem," West said, cutting him off.

It was the wrong thing to say, and the wrong time to say it, and I opened my mouth to say something - anything - to take the man's attention from West. What came out of my mouth, however, was a scream, as I watched the man reach into his back pocket and pull out a butterfly knife.

I was the only one who saw the knife at first. My scream alerted the man's companions, and the three of them lunged for him - too late. He had West pinned against the wall and slashed downward once with the knife before the others managed to wrestle his arm behind his back and drag him away. The man collapsed in their arms, sobbing out a woman's name - his wife's, I assume.

(and god why can't I remember her name?)

"Get him out!" I shouted, in a voice that didn't sound like mine. "Get them both out, _now_!"

Two of the men hoisted the attacker and drag-carried him from the parlor, leaving the other two to stare at the unwieldy corpse of his wife.

"There's a cot in the corner - wheel her out on that," I said. "Through the back door. Bring your car around." It was the way West and I had gotten the boxer out of the house, and if the two of us could manage that, these men could manage the woman's corpse easily.

As they rushed to assemble the cot, I caught hold of the arm of the man who'd brought the boxer in two nights ago. "Calm him down," I hissed in his ear. "He says anything - to the hospital, the police, whoever - about what goes on here, and you know what happens to you."

Actually, I had no idea what would happen to him - but the man's face turned ashy, and he began to nod frantically, squirming us way out of my grip. "Sure, sure," he said, "no problem, nothing to worry about."

I waited until the men had both the attacker and his wife safely in the car before shooing the remaining would-be patients out of our living room. They grumbled, but none of them dared to protest to my face. It was only when we were finally alone, with both doors locked and bolted, that I was able to turn my attention to West.

He'd slumped onto a stool as though in shock, one hand pressed to the left side of his face, blood running through his fingers.

"Let me see it," I said, prising his hand away. It was a nasty gash - it had missed West's eye by a quarter of an inch - but at least the knife had been sharp, the edges clean. I had to suture it myself. West refused any anesthetic save a scant handful of aspirin, but by the time I finished, he'd come to himself enough to criticize my stitches as "sloppy."

"Hold still and let me finish," was all I said in reply.

When I'd finished, and was snipping a piece of gauze to use for a bandage, I asked "what happened?"

West shrugged. "Her kid went missing yesterday. The police wouldn't issue an AMBER alert - too soon - so they were out searching the woods. And she just…" he made a gesture with his hands of something toppling over. "Too much exertion."

I froze, scissors in mid-cut. "Was it Josh?"

"Huh?"

"The kid who went missing."

West raised his eyebrows and gave me a disgusted look. I turned back to the gauze.

"Did they find him?" I asked.

West didn't answer.

Despite my exhaustion, I spent a sleepless afternoon pacing the empty house. My thoughts were consumed with scenarios - most of them involving the police raiding our illegal medical practice, or finding the body we'd buried in the woods. The day wore on, with no one attempting to visit the house, which worried me all the more. I was sure word of the altercation had spread among our usual patients - and who was to say that any of them wouldn't go to the police?

West affected indifference, but I could tell that the unexpected absence of patients made him twitchy. He smoked more than usual, stalking up and down stairs and in and out of rooms. We finally went to bed early for lack of anything better to do.

I don't remember falling asleep that night, but I remember waking up. The sound that woke me wasn't a knock, exactly, more of a rattling scratching that rose in volume before stopping, and then beginning all over again. My first thought, once my brain emerged from its sleep-induced haze, was of the police. The men from this afternoon had told them about our practice, and they were here to arrest us. Maybe they'd already found the body of the boxer. Now they were rattling at our back door, trying to get in.

West was already out of bed, tying the cord on his bathrobe. He turned, saw me awake, and said "it's just a patient." But he didn't bother to hide it when he took his gun out of his holster.

"You can't answer the door with that!" I gasped in sudden panic. "What if it's the police - they'll shoot you!"

"It's not the police, it's a patient," West replied, voice calm and steady.

"At the back door? A patient would come to the front!"

"So would the police," West replied, and I had to admit that he had a point. I realized then who he really thought was at the door - the dead woman's husband, come to finish him off.

"If we ignore him, maybe he'll go away," I suggested.

West threw my bathrobe at me. "Get up," he said. "If it is a patient, we should both go. If not-" He didn't finish the sentence. I put on my robe and followed him down the stairs.

The house was worse in the dark than it was in the daytime, full of odd creaks and groans as we walked down the stairs. I tried to quell my breath, to move silently and quickly as West did, but I couldn't quite manage it. Every step I took seemed to elicit a new whine or grunt from the floorboards, and the sounds mixed eerily with the resumed scratches and poundings at the back door.

When we finally made it to the kitchen, I felt as though my throat had been tied into a knot. Even in the dim moonlight, I could see the door shaking at the increased assault of whatever was behind it. It couldn't be the police, I realized - they'd be shouting at us to open up in the name of the law - well, nothing so cliched, but something to that effect. Whatever was at the door was worse than the police, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

"West," I whispered, "maybe we shouldn't-"

"Shhh," West said, and opened the door.

I didn't see what was on our doorstep exactly. I registered only a hulking bulk in the doorway that paused before lunging into the kitchen. Then there was only the flat crack as West fired his handgun over and over and over - so quickly I could barely distinguish one shot from another.

The figure slumped onto the tile floor, its head scudding to a stop inches from my feet. It was mud-streaked, battered, hideous. But I didn't start to scream until I saw what was in its mouth.

My ears were ringing from the gunfire, so I hardly heard myself - I only felt the rasping in my throat as I shrieked, then the rush of air as I breathed in. But before I could scream again, West hit me across the face, slamming me into a kitchen counter. I dropped to the floor, hitting my head on a protruding cupboard handle, my feet splayed in front of me.

I looked up at West, shocked. He looked back, as though almost puzzled by the fact that he'd knocked me down.

"You have to stop making that noise," he said. "Someone's bound to hear the shots as it is."

I looked at West, clutching my cheek, then looked down at the figure in front of me.

It was the boxer. His entire body was streaked with mud and dirt. His hands and arms were scratched, as though he'd fought his way through a cluster of nettles. But his face was the worst part. His mouth was smeared with a crusty brown stain that could only be dried blood, and protruding from it was a tiny hand. It could only have belonged to a child of five or younger, and it ended in a ragged stump. It looked like a starfish that had crawled upon the shore and died.

"Get up," West said, holding out one hand to pull me to my feet.

I got up, but I didn't take West's hand. I shot to one side, running up the stairs and into the bedroom. I dressed quickly, then grabbed a suitcase out of the closet, and stuffed it with whatever clothes I could get my hands on - mine, his, it didn't matter. West came in while I was cramming a fistful of my underwear into one of the suitcase corners.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What does it look like?" I snapped, not looking at him.

He didn't answer for a time. I went to the bathroom and retrieved my toothbrush. When I came back, West was staring at my suitcase as though he'd never seen one in his life.

"Why?" he asked.

"You're so smart," I said, shutting the suitcase, hearing it latch. "You figure it out."

I went down the stairs, suitcase in hand. West followed.

"It's unnecessary," he said when we reached the foyer. "Next time-"

"No!" I shouted, whirling around, narrowly missing hitting him with a corner of the suitcase. "There's no next time! Not for me. I'm _done_."

At this, and for the first time since I'd known him, West appeared to be genuinely hurt. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed it.

He didn't say anything more, and didn't stop me as I went to the car, put my suitcase in the trunk, and got in. He didn't even go beyond the porch - only stood there, leaned against the rail, and watched me go. As I backed the car down the path, all I could see of him was the red tip of his cigarette, tiny against the vast black of that house.

I drove for hours, keeping my mind carefully on the dark stretch of road ahead. It was only when I reached the outskirts of Boston that I had to pull over and sob, leaning my head against the steering wheel. I wasn't thinking about the boxer, or Josh and his mother, about Dean Halsey, or any of it. All I could think of was how certain I was that I would never see West again.


End file.
